Eric writes: (welcome aboard, by the way!)
>Just a quick comment about the ECAC stats.  Seems to me that the
>schools that are most represented (Cornell, Clarkson, RPI) are the
>ones that have large (and good) engineering programs.  Do you think
>there is some correlation between college hockey fans and engineering
>or could it just be that only computer hackers and "techies" would
>think of subcribing to the list?  Food for thought.
 
I don't think that there is as much of a connection as you may think.  You
have to remember that the Internet is not truly representative of the real
world.  It's skewed towards the fact that most of the people who have access
are those in technical occupations or in CS/EE programs at colleges.  My view
is that those schools (and others like MTU) are strongly represented here
because of a few reasons.  One is that there are more students in CS/EE there
and those are the ones who most tend to "hack" around and find out how to get
on things like mailing lists.  Another is that at some schools, the computer
facilities are more readily available to the student population than at
others.
 
There are exceptions, and we do have many subscribers here who aren't
experts in computers but learned about the list through friends and found it
interesting enough to look into.  Heather is a good example - for a non-CS/EE
degree receipient, she is actually very well skilled in the use of computers,
but she only found out about the list (and met me :-)) because her class
in Statistics required use of Plattsburgh's VAX.  She happened upon the list
of accessible mailing lists and the word HOCKEY jumped out at her, and the
rest, as they say, is history. :-)  But her degree is actually in Int'l
Business and Spanish (double major) and she currently manages two MailBoxes
Etc's near Syracuse, NY, which is about as far as you can get from being
a techie. :-)  BTW, we are working on a way to get her back on this list and
hockey3, and that may happen as soon as this weekend.
 
It is also interesting to find that for some people, finding out about the
list has gotten them to learn more about computers than they would have
otherwise, and I think that is definitely a good thing.  Just like for some
people, working with computers has gotten them to learn more about hockey. :-)
 
>The fact that Harvard was not very well represented, just goes to show
>that even though they have had excellent hockey teams for many years
>now, their fans just don't compare us diehards at Cornell (Lynah
>Faithful), Clarkson and RPI.
 
Again, I don't think Harvard's low representation compared to some of the
other schools (and the low representation of others) indicates that their
fans are any less interested in their teams.  It's just a characteristic of
the school's makeup and students' access to the systems.  We know that BU
fans are absolutely rabid, yet they're only represented by a couple of people.
And remember that those numbers are only approximate.
 
Hey, I could even suggest that maybe they're underrepresented compared to the
RPIs and Clarksons because Harvard students spend more time doing real work
than you guys. :-)
---
Mike Machnik    [log in to unmask]   mikem@{beanpot,bubba}.ma30.bull.com
(Any opinions expressed above are strictly those of the poster.)